So after one month at sea, Challenger has now covered nearly 700km! Although we have not made as much progress as we had hoped after getting tripped up with our troubles steering, we have learned a lot that will aid us as we continue along with the mission.
Looking to the myocean dataset, Challenger is now just about even with center of the warm core eddy to our west, so over the next day we will most likely move the way point south to cut to the west along the rotation of the eddy.
Through the night, Challenger will be running a new test for us, this one making her top inflections at 100m instead of 20m from the surface. The purpose of this test is to get an accurate reading on the energy consumption of staying deep on our inflections. Staying deep like this keeps Challenger out of the reaches of sunlight and in doing so avoiding the areas most teaming with the biology that could slow us down.
To the north, Silbo has run into his own hiccoughs…
Early this morning, Silbo reported some problems that resulted in the mission being reset and Silbo running the ‘initial’ mission. This resulted in quite a bit of drifting back to the north as we were no longer actively fighting the currents. But soon after our teammate Ben from TWR was able to grab control of Silbo and get him back on his way with a way point back to the south west.
Now that Silbo stable and back on his way, we turn our focus back to the massive warm eddy we are creeping up on. Now just 48 km from the first signals of southern flux, we expect to begin feeling the effects within the week
Force Wind Sea & Honor